Tag: play

Watching Tiger this spring reminded me of an old Roger Federer quote. A new Tiger biography released March 27, written by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian, exhaustively details Tiger’s childhood, his meteoric rise and fall, scandals and all. “My goal all along had been that, by playing and winning golf, I could somehow help golfers, and perhaps people outside the game, be color blind,” Tiger wrote in the book “The 1997 Masters: My Story” co-written with Lorne Rubenstein. The second time Trump and Tiger played, “Get Out” director Jordan Peele retweeted a video of Trump and Tiger together with the caption “Now you’re in The Sunken Place” and the tweet went viral, but any controversy over the round quickly faded. The last thing anyone wants is to see Tiger double over pain at the 13th tee at the Masters because he has just seen Bubba Watson drive one over the trees and carry the dogleg and his ego can’t resist swinging so hard and Tiger reaches his breaking point. I recently spoke to Golf Channel analyst and occasional Tiger Woods skeptic Brandel Chamblee, and we were joking about what it’s like to be on the record, as both of us are, about how a Tiger comeback was unlikely. Rose: You don’t? Tiger: No. Rose: You’ve accepted that? Tiger: I’ve accepted I’m going to get more. Another generation of golf fans – my kids, your kids, Tiger’s kids – will get to witness some magic that seemed, not long ago, improbable.

The Net isn’t terribly good as movies go, but it is more real, more current, than I suspected two decades ago. Our feelings about these changes were mirrored in the movies as fear and beguilement-a bunch of rubes trying to make sense of this darned technology eager to eat our minds. The internet is still eating our minds-and now, more than ever, the movies themselves. Dozens of recent movies dramatize the act of vanishing down the internet’s rabbit holes, into the gloss of a digitally manipulated life. The sequel to 2015’s slick, unnerving horror movie Unfriended will travel to the Dark Web, where the most ghoulish, Bitcoin-backed corners of the internet spring to life, and, eventually, bring death. All of these movies are products of a world that isn’t necessarily afraid of the internet-just obsessed with it. Movies about the consequences of the internet aren’t new, exactly. It has zapped movies of an inherent power-the ability to transport, to reinvent or recontextualize what’s possible in the world.

Which player is the biggest surprise of the regular season? Justin Verrier: Victor Oladipo. An unlucky face contusion at the hands of Markelle Fultz may sideline Embiid for the rest of the regular season, but Embiid staying injury-free from the neck down and playing at an All-Star level for 63 games is shocking given his injury-filled past. The Raptors’ bench has been one of the best stories of the season, and he’s been the captain of it. Which player is the biggest disappointment of the regular season? Gonzalez: Isaiah Thomas has had an awful run. Wall’s playoff performance last year had him on a short list for the top players in the East, but his age-27 season ended up being a lost one. Which team is the biggest surprise of the regular season? Tjarks: The Blazers have emerged out of the pack in the middle of the West and look like the third-best team in the conference heading into the postseason. Which team is the biggest disappointment of the regular season? Gonzalez: Detroit. There weren’t a lot of expectations surrounding the Pistons coming into the season, but given that they went all in on this season twice it wasn’t unreasonable to expect them to snatch one of the playoff spots at the bottom of the Eastern Conference-or at least make the race competitive into the final week of the season.

Two decades after the day when StarCraft players first flooded onto Blizzard’s online gaming platform, Battle.net, in force, the game remains one of the finest examples of the real-time-strategy style that made the bones of Blizzard, its renowned developer. StarCraft may be one of gaming’s best examples of “Order out of chaos.” It’s fairly rare for any reminiscing designer to say that a seminal project went off without a hitch; in game development, delays and midstream reconceptions are standard-occupational hazards of the inexact art of creating collections of code that feel fun. The first StarCraft design that the public saw, Sigaty says, was “a quickly turned-around version that we put out there, built on top of Warcraft II.” Blizzard brought that alpha version of the game to the industry’s annual hypefest, E3, in May 1996, where it underwhelmed gamers who were expecting to see something more than a reskinning of the same old design. “When you got into an argument with a kid at school, instead of ‘Hey, meet me after school in the playground and we’ll settle this,’ it [was] like, ‘Meet me in the game room and we’re going to settle this over a game of StarCraft,'” Morhaime says. In Warcraft II, Wyatt says, “You’d create a game, and then you would join, and you’d all sort of argue over what the parameters of the game should be, which led to a lot of people dropping out and then you’d have to go and get more players together again.” In StarCraft, the creator would simply pick preset parameters, and players could join if those parameters appealed to them. “Starcraft revolutionized the way that people thought about online game networks, and it basically crushed the possibility to charge hourly fees for games,” Wyatt says, adding, “In some ways, I think that eventually led to the whole free-to-play genre.” Because Battle.net had no barrier to entry, Starcraft drew a giant pool of players, making finding games easy-which, in turn, made the prospect of playing even more appealing. “Even though we knew we had a good player-vs.-player game on our hands, the level and the stature it got to was beyond all our wildest expectations,” Sigaty says. Although the game was intended to exceed the typical title’s shelf life, it went well beyond what Blizzard believed the limit to be.

HQ has several regular presenters in its rotation, but by far the most beloved is Rogowsky, a stand-up comic whose massive popularity has become inextricable from that of the app itself. Rogowsky’s punny, slightly manic between-question patter is rife with pop culture references, including “Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty, let’s get this show on the road,” the repurposed Phish lyrics with which he opens every game. Sharon Carpenter, the broadcast journalist who presents the UK edition of the game, arrives, taking Rogowsky’s place in hair and makeup. By 3:14 p.m., the afternoon’s work is done, and he changes into a pair of trousers that match his jacket before leaving HQ HQ. Rogowsky’s credits include the ABC hidden-camera reality show Would You Fall for That? with future Saturday Night Live cast member Sasheer Zamata, as well as a series of popular videos in which he reads books with ridiculous fake covers on the subway. Once he’d given up on proceeding with the game, Rogowsky bravely ad-libbed through the five endless minutes left until the clock struck midnight. “I can’t comment on the specifics of what we’re doing with NBC or what happened there – but yeah, we got a free Super Bowl ad.” On the day of my visit, after he wraps the afternoon’s game, Rogowsky asks Teitel, “Was NBC watching?”. The first of these, Ready Player One, was energetically pitched by Rogowsky throughout the $250,000 game on Wednesday, the day of the movie’s premiere. Rogowsky had aspired to host his own talk show on TV, or to serve as a correspondent on a comedy news outfit like The Daily Show.

Having played Fortnite herself, she could speak their language, and made a proposal: if everyone finished their work without a single interruption, they’d hold a big discussion about Fortnite. It’s hard to tell when something moves from popular to cultural phenomenon, but it seems similar to the Ernest Hemingway quote about going bankrupt: “Gradually, and then suddenly.” I knew Fortnite was officially big when my wife’s younger sister, who’s not into games, asked me if I could explain this “Fortnite” thing and why all her guy friends were playing it. How long Fortnite remains the talk of the playground is impossible to know, but the students, teachers, and parents I’ve talked to the past week said they haven’t seen something grip the children around them since Minecraft. A number of teachers echoed this, observing how some of the biggest introverts are also some of the best Fortnite players in their class, and their expertise has transformed them into bonafide extroverts because everyone’s coming to them looking for advice on how to play. Maybe we already have the best metric to know whether Fortnite is a phenomenon, and it has nothing to do with Twitch concurrents or YouTube views. I heard from plenty of parents and teachers who said their daughters were into it, and in some cases, Fortnite became the first time they’d bonded over a shared interest in games. Fortnite is still a game that involves players running around with guns-assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles-and it’s a point that hasn’t been lost on parents like Keith Krepcho, whose nine-year-old just started playing Fortnite. Fortnite Gatsby, a student re-imagining of The Great Gatsby, became a tale of Tom and Daisy living in Snobby Shores, a notable location in Fortnite’s Battle Royale map, while Gatsby watches as 100 new “Dreamers” are brought to his island by bus.

Sheriff of Nottingham: Recommended by several staffers, this bluffing party game is a lot of fun once you get the hang of it, but it takes longer to master than our picks. It took us far longer to play than the estimated time on the box, and players can “Die” with zero points and then have to wait out the rest of the game. King of Tokyo: Wirecutter writer Liz Thomas loves this game, which has a host of wacky characters, from zombies to aliens, that battle players to become the King of Tokyo. Kingdom Builder: We dismissed this tile-laying, settlement-building game because our experts said there were better games in this genre, and it has a weaker Board Game Geek rating-7.0 out of 10, across 15,000 ratings-than similar games like Carcassonne and Catan. Betrayal at House on the Hill: We think Betrayal at House on the Hill is too complex for beginners, and we’ve seen better advanced cooperative games. Mysterium is a cooperative deduction game that Wirecutter staffers like, but compared with our party-game picks, it has a drawn-out playing time and low replay value. We like Qwixx a lot, but dismissed it in favor of party games that could accommodate more players. Azul typically costs $80, making it one of the most expensive games we found.

When Ready Player One came out, it felt like an escapist fantasy for gamers Back in 2011, it was almost impossible not to think about Ready Player One as harmless fun. Ready Player One is there to serve that pleasure to its readers on a silver platter – assuming its readers are also gamers obsessed with the bits of ’80s pop culture that were built with teenage boys in mind. The main thing Ready Player One is doing is telling those ’80s-boy-culture-obsessed gamers that they matter, that in fact they are the most important people in the universe. Over the course of the book’s first act, 18-year-old Zack Lightman goes from nerdy high school gamer to a captain in the Earth Defense Alliance, adored by all for his video game prowess and provided with not only his favorite snacks and gaming music but also a specially bred strain of weed designed specifically for gaming. The aesthetic pleasure here is the same as it was in Ready Player One – “I get that reference!” – and so is the central idea: that gamers have the potential to be the most important people in the universe. What’s important for the Ready Player One conversation is what Gamergate had evolved into by 2015, and that is: angry gamers hurling abuse at their targets in the name of a kind of nerd purity. How Gamergate killed Ready Player One Both Wade and Zack follow Alexander’s imperatives like they’re checking them off a list: They start off poor but then make millions from their video games. The moment reads as lip service, because Ready Player One’s heart has no time for the world outside of video games, not really.

An NBA court is 94 feet wide and 50 feet tall, and at only 21 years old, Ben Simmons manipulates the geometry of his surroundings about as well as any player. Basketball isn’t played in a vacuum, but Simmons does seem to operate in a physical bubble. There will be at least 6 feet between Simmons and his closest defender on nearly every play he initiates. A Martian catching an ESPN broadcast from outer space would wonder why Simmons is the only player in the NBA with an undetectable repulsion field. On one play in Philadelphia’s blowout win over Minnesota on Saturday, Simmons just stopped. No full-time point guard in NBA history has been as tall as Simmons. There are 11 three-man units that allow fewer than 100 points per 100 possessions; seven of them are Sixers lineups, and six of them involve Simmons. The way in which Simmons is defended is unlike all but one starting ball handler in the league, a player who had at one time exemplified the same joy that Simmons evokes today.

Stephen Curry suffered a Grade 2 MCL sprain to his left knee in the Warriors’ 106-94 win over the Hawks on Friday. The MCL flexes as the knee bends during the type of quick lateral movements and changes of direction that guards like Curry use to create space. Things weren’t the same with Steph the first time we saw him fight through a knee injury in the postseason: Curry lacked his typical elite shiftiness and burst after a Grade 1 tear to his right MCL forced him to miss two weeks of the 2016 playoffs. The Warriors outscore opponents by an amazing 14.3 points per 100 possessions when Curry is on the floor, per Cleaning the Glass. The game undeniably changes without Curry; the Warriors’ ball movement isn’t as crisp, their assist totals dip, and they settle for more midrange jumpers. Only 28.9 percent of their shot attempts come from midrange with Curry on the floor, per Cleaning the Glass, compared to 42.9 percent when he’s off; they essentially go from shooting the second-fewest in the league to the fourth-most without Curry. That’d be a burden on both players considering the demand they’d have to handle in Curry’s stead. Warriors coach Steve Kerr would probably be better served saving those lineups for the later rounds. The G-League call-up is averaging 21.5 points, 5.3 rebounds, and 4.5 assists with a 69.3 true shooting percentage over the past four games, while showcasing a skill set that can coexist with Curry’s once the Warriors star returns.